July 09, 2013

Shake Reduction vs. Smart Sharpen in Photoshop CC

How do the various improvements to sharpening in Photoshop CC relate to each other? PM Zorana Gee posted a blurb I found helpful:

Shake Reduction is to remove blur caused by subtle shaking of your camera. Smart Sharpen is about sharpening the existing pixels (2D blurs) – no analysis of image or how the blur happened. They do actually work quite well together. Start with Shake Reduction as it requires the most original data in order to find the blur trace and then use Smart Sharpen.

Warm photos, warm hearts

I’ve always said that Instagram isn’t about photography, but rather about making people feel loved & validated. Perhaps the warmth of “vintage” effects is more than figurative. The NYT, writing about the benefits of nostalgia:

It has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.

Bruce Lee gets unearthed through CGI

For real?

Creator Joseph Kahn writes,

My good friend BBH Creative Executive Johnny Tan and I first talked about doing this concept a year ago. We shot it in Hong Kong, and then we worked with vfx company The Mill in London to create a completely CGI Bruce Lee over nine months. EVERY shot of his head and every detail in there is completely cgi. We got Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, to come aboard and we really picked her brain to make sure that everything was accurate from look to soul. We wanted to be as respectful to the man and legend as we could.

Be like water, my friend, so that someday you may bend when they dig up & puppet you, too. [Vimeo] [Via Fran Roig]

Lists of desired features are interesting because they let us know what it is you want. Descriptions of what these features should do are interesting because it provides clarity around how you think about the features.

But what really scores points are use cases. Tell us what you are trying to do because that tells us what problem we need to go solve.

For example:

“I shoot pictures of sunsets. Almost always this generates a lot of photos — 10, 20, 30, 100. I want to share the photos but I want to just share a few so as not to overwhelm my audience. I need Revel to make it easier to go from 10 to 100 photos down to 2 to 5 photos.”

Note that that didn’t specify particular features. It specified a problem and what it gave us was a use case that we can reference and judge features against. It sets us up to ask “how well does the image review feature work for solving the sunset problem”?

Sometimes the use case for a feature is obvious. But that’s not always true, and by couching requests and discussions in terms of use cases, we have another way to check and confirm that we are all on the same wavelength.